Top state Republicans go to desperate lengths to stop a far-reaching women's rights agenda.

THE STAKES:

They can't get away with this, can they?

It's not just Gov. Andrew Cuomo who has put his otherwise admirable women's rights agenda in jeopardy for want of details. State Senate Republican leader Dean Skelos is suddenly the biggest obstacle of all to proposals to protect abortion rights and guarantee equal pay.

He's so opposed to putting his party on record opposing abortion rights that he's ready to resort to one of the oldest and cheapest stunts in the handbook of political dysfunction: He won't even allow the measure to come to a vote.

Mr. Skelos' heavy-handed politics come complete with an alarmingly disingenuous twist. He claims the abortion rights provision that many of his fellow Republicans and conservatives oppose is unnecessary because abortion will always be legal. "Roe v. Wade is never going to be changed," Mr. Skelos says.

By now, abortion rights supporters should be very wary of politicians who pay grudging lip service to the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe decision as the law of the land but otherwise resist the spirit of that ruling. Or who pretend to know what an ever-shifting high court will do in the future.

It's because of the very possibility that abortion rights could be restricted by a court ruling that Mr. Cuomo wants to codify them in the appropriate section of state law. Treating abortion as a medical procedure subject to public health law rather than criminal law would offer women the certainty that they would control decisions about their own health.

State Republican leader Ed Cox goes well beyond the pale, for example, as he accuses the governor of wanting to "expand late-term abortions in New York, even up to the day of a baby's birth." That's simply untrue.

Old tricks prevail in a Senate where Republicans cling to power thanks to a coalition with renegade Democrats that has left the party with a Senate majority impotent to demand a vote on a matter they would otherwise support. It's not unlike two years ago, when Mr. Skelos vainly tried to block a Senate vote on gay marriage.

Listen to him now.

"You know what? What people are talking about are jobs, taxes, spending," he says. "That's what they are concerned about."